- November 2011 was marked by a large number of wrongful prosecutions, and a jump – as was expected – in the abuse of anti-extremist legislation during the parliamentary election campaign.
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- Criminal Prosecution
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- In November, we recorded at least five wrongful convictions in criminal cases: three for membership in the banned organization "Hizb ut-Tahrir," one against a follower of Said Nursi and one against Jehovah's Witnesses. The last sentence was the sensational case of Alexander Kalistratov of Gorno-Altaisk, who received 100 hours of community service. Amnesty International noted that ruling was contrary to Russian and international law.
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- At least four criminal cases were filed in November.
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- We also want to draw special attention to the cancellation of a decision to discontinue the prosecution of members of the Voina art-protest group in St. Petersburg. Despite the fact that a new expert’s examination of the case failed to find the defendants’ actions to be extremist, the case remains open. In our view it is an arbitrary, artificial and unlawful delay in the judicial process.
- There is also good news: the long story of Khabarovsk Volya party activist Natalia Ignatyeva has come to a close. The false criminal case against her under Part 1 of Article 282 (incitement to social hatred), after she read the poem “Ivan’s Final Wish” at a rally, was closed in July 2010. This month, she was awarded compensation for moral damages in the amount of 338,696 rubles (just under 11,000 USD at the time of writing).
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- Administrative prosecution
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- This month we recorded only one wrongful administrative conviction, but it falls into a greater pattern of similar instances. A Magistrate’s Court in the city of Muravlenko (in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District) fined a local library director 2,000 rubles (about 60 USD) under Article 20.29 of the Administrative Code (possession of extremist materials for distribution) for so-called extremist materials found in the library’s stacks.
- Prohibition of materials for extremism
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- In November it became known that the Lublino and Moscow Meshchansky District Courts banned a total of 29 materials related to the organization "Hizb ut-Tahrir." At least two of them - issues of the journal "Caliphate" – do not contain any outright extremism, in our opinion. The only grounds on which they could be banned seem to be their origin in a banned organization and their campaign for recruitment into it. Recall, it is Sova’s position that the ban on "Hizb ut-Tahrir" was not justified because the court decision was not presented with evidence of their extremist (and, even more, terrorist) activity.
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- Rulemaking
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- In November, the Ministry of Culture presented for public discussion a draft regulation regarding the public presentation of films in Russia. Among other things, it hopes to restrict the presentation of movies with "propaganda and the approval of terrorism and extremism," as well as those mentioning banned extremist organizations without reference to their ban. Both, in our view, are not only pointless but impossible.
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- Electioneering
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- November 2011 was expected to be a fruitful month when it came to the display of inappropriate anti-extremism measures in relation to the parliamentary elections.
- Most unfair accusations of extremism – which were primarily accusations of initiating social hatred – were levied against representatives of the Just Russia party. In Kurgan, the local election committee initiated the seizure of various Just Russia election materials for alleged extremism. We remind readers that the practice of illegally seizing such materials for review requires only a few copies to be sent for judicial decision-making, and in this case, the entire print run was taken.
- The Central Electoral Committee also effected the removal of at least five Just Russia videos from local “Rossiya” television bureaus in the Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Voronezh and Astrakhan regions and the Altai and Stavropol territories.
- In Barnaul, we also recorded the seizure of objects from the offices of the election-monitoring organization Golos; seizure of the edition “Nakh Nakh” to be “verified for extremism;” and a ban on the distribution of a Communist Party leaflet authored by party chair Gennady Zyuganov entitled, "Get up! Russian People!" It is Sova’s position that none of these contain elements of extremism sufficient for their seizure.
